Tag: Bali

There be dragons, and a visit could cost US$1000 – The Times

Sunset over islands in East Nusa Tenggara. (Simon Roughneen)

BANGKOK — In a hint that Indonesia could be tiring of the drunken antics of young Western visitors to the holiday island of Bali, President Joko Widodo said he wants only “super premium” visitors to nearby islands that are home to the Komodo dragon, the world’s biggest and deadliest lizard. “Don’t mix with the middle lower ones,” Widodo told a conference in capital Jakarta, implying that Labuan Bajo, an island in eastern Indonesia that is the gateway to Komodo, one of the handful of islands where the eponymous reptiles can be seen, opt for well-to-do tourists. Local officials have touted a US$1000 “annual membership” fee to visit Komodo for a look at the lizards, which hunt deer and buffalo, packing a venomous bite that can kill an adult human. 

Free from darkness – Southeast Asia Globe/RTÉ World Report

Zubaidi working a new fishing boat in Kwangko. Photo: Simon Roughneen

KWANGKO, SUMBAWA ISLAND — As afternoon turns to evening and the high and blinding sun sinks slowly toward the horizon, Zubaidi still keeps the peak of his cap tilted slightly down, all the better to run an eye over the sky-blue paint job on the small skiff he and his small team are putting the finishing touches to. Behind Zubaidi’s seaside house, set about three feet up on stilts to keep the floor above any high tide, the whine of the electric saws and planes readies another batch of precision-cut timber for the next boat, each one to be sold to eager local fishermen at 1.5 million Indonesian Rupiah (US$106) a pop. Less than two years before, Zubaidi and team had to saw the planks by hand. It was only a year and a half ago that his tiny village of Kwangko on the coast of the island of Sumbawa was connected to the national electricity supply. “I can do three times as much now, more than I had before we got power,” Zubaidi says. “Now you have to pre-order if you want a boat.”

U.S.-China trade war has yet to hurt rest of Asia – Nikkei Asian Review

NUSA DUA — Asia is not yet feeling the effects of growing trade friction between China and the U.S., due to the internal strengths of the region’s “solid” economies, according to Takehiko Nakao, president of the Asian Development Bank. The trade dispute “is not as damaging right away,” Nakao told the Nikkei Asian Review on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank meetings being held in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian island of Bali. “The Asian economies are solid,” Nakao said, but he also warned that any escalation of the tariff war between the world’s two biggest economies could hit Asian exporters hard. “If it escalates, if it damages supply chains, as East Asia is connected to [global] supply chains, it could have a dire impact,” Nakao said. The fear is that complex supply chains, in which multinational companies make or source parts for finished goods in countries across Asia before final assembly, often in China, could be disrupted. But for now, domestic demand within Asia’s bigger economies could offset the impact of the trade restrictions, Nakao said earlier at the forum.

Power and water outages on Indonesian island as ‘quake death toll rises to 131 – Los Angeles Times

JAKARTA – Relief workers and soldiers worked to restore electricity, distribute tents and set up temporary kitchens Wednesday as officials raised the death toll in a 6.9-magnitude earthquake on the Indonesian island of Lombok to 131.
An additional 26 fatalities were confirmed from Sunday’s temblor as relief teams were finally reaching some villages and mountainous areas that had been inaccessible due to landslides, collapsed bridges and other damage. But as emergency crews comb more of the eastern Indonesian resort island, the death toll “will continue to grow,” said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the Indonesian Disaster Management Agency. “There is a lot of damage,” Nugroho told a news conference in Jakarta, adding that another 1,500 people were injured and 155,000 were displaced from their homes.

Man pulled alive from flattened mosque on earthquake-hit island – Los Angeles Times

JAKARTA – The death toll in Sunday’s 6.9-magnitude earthquake on the Indonesian island of Lombok has risen from 98 to 105, a number that is likely to increase as relief and rescue teams struggle to reach cut-off villages in the worst-hit areas. “It is estimated that the number of victims will increase because the evacuation of victims affected by the [collapsed] buildings is still [being] carried out,” said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the Indonesian Disaster Management Agency, which put the number of those displaced by the disaster at 84,000. On Tuesday, rescue workers pulled a man alive from the rubble of a mosque that collapsed during evening prayers when the earthquake struck at 7:46 p.m. on Sunday. A 23-year-old woman was also rescued from the rubble of a minimart in the town of Pemenang.

East Timor’s tourism still in the slow lane – Nikkei Asian Review

DILI — When Joshua Kohn and Lea Mietzle set out backpacking around Southeast Asia, East Timor was not on their itinerary. But after visiting Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines and then parts of Indonesia, the two young Germans revised their plans to include the region’s newest country, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. “We became interested [in East Timor], it was really cool” said Kohn. During their 12 days in the country they took in some of the main landmarks: trekking up the highest peak, the near 3,000-meter-high Mount Ramelau, followed by a bone-rattling motorcycle ride eastwards to Jaco, a tiny uninhabited island. With secluded white sand beaches fronting turquoise seas and kaleidoscopic reefs — all offering lush diving — East Timor aims to triple annual visitor numbers to 200,000 by 2030, part of a plan to diversify an economy that depends oil and gas for almost all government revenue.

Diver exposes plastic rubbish off Bali coast – The Daily Telegraph

JAKARTA — Footage of a vast plastic ‘slick’ shot by a British diver off the coast of Bali has put renewed focus on the growing threat of ocean pollution. Rich Horner filmed himself swimming through swathes of plastic rubbish floating in turquoise waters around 15 miles offshore from Denpasar, the Balinese regional capital. The footage is being seen as a warning over increasingly toxic levels of plastic waste along some of the most picturesque shorelines of Indonesia, which is heavily reliant on tourism. “Plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic sheets, plastic buckets, plastic sachets, plastic straws, plastic baskets, plastic bags, more plastic bags,” Horner wrote.

Volcano puts visitor lives on hold – The Daily Telegraph

Memorial at the site of the 2002 Bali bombing, which targetted tourists and Indonesians (Simon

KUALA LUMPUR — As seismic activity increases around the rumbling Mount Agung volcano in the Indonesian tourist magnet island Bali, British people on the island are coming to terms with the uncertainty of not knowing if the volcano will go off and how severe any eruption might be. “Getting a heavy fall of ash is probably my biggest concern. But I guess that will all depend on winds and the size of the eruption,” said Graham Hindle, a gas industry worker who divides his time between his job in the western Australian desert and his family in Bali, an island a little over a quarter the size of Wales.

Dreadlocks, dreamers and do-gooders – The Edge Review

BALI – As ground zero for Bali’s beach and booze crowd, Kuta has no literary pretensions beyond the bawdy car stickers and smutty T-shirts hawked along the main drag. Wading through the tat, it is hard to believe that this is the same island where literary luminaries such as Amitav Ghosh and Tash Aw enchant crowds with exquisite exegeses of exile, loss, memory and tacky women on the make, as they did recently at this year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Ubud, a hillside town of Hindu temples and wind-chimes in Bali’s heart, is a magnet for dreadlocked, tie-dyed Westerners who seem to subsist on little more than quinoa and squirrel droppings and bits of tree bark.